2026 FinTech Predictions: Insights from Julie Sutton of Paymentology

I spoke with Julie Sutton, Head of Growth, Europe at Paymentology, a global issuer-processor empowering banks and fintechs with agile, cloud-native payments technology.

Julie shares her perspective on the infrastructure shifts, emerging technologies, and strategic priorities that will define the year ahead for financial services.

Over to you Julie - my questions are in bold:

What's the biggest shift you expect across financial services in 2026?

What's changing is how banks are judged. Launching new features matters less than it used to. What matters more is how systems behave when something unexpected happens.

Customers want credit that fits their spending patterns, while fraud pressures are pushing banks and fintechs to intervene much earlier in the payment flow. Together, those demands are exposing how adaptable an institution really is.

That shift is also showing up in boardrooms and regulatory conversations, where the focus has moved towards response times, loss handling and operational resilience, rather than product rollout alone.

The same pressure sits behind the second wave of digital banks now emerging across Europe. New entrants such as Snappi are launching with full licences and cloud-first infrastructure, designed around real-time decisioning, local behaviour and constant availability.

Which emerging technology will have the most practical impact on banks and the FinTechs that support them?

Stablecoins are now part of regular conversations with banks about payments infrastructure.

The discussion is usually very practical. Banks are asking whether stablecoins could realistically be used for settlement or cross-border payments, and what that would mean for the systems they already run.

That's where infrastructure decisions start to matter. Stablecoins introduce fresh challenges, with multi-coin settlement and chain support questions plaguing early implementations.This is why technology ownership and cloud-first design are becoming more important than one-off integrations, enabling banks and fintechs to quickly adapt and add features as stablecoin infrastructure matures.

What customer behaviours or expectations will most challenge banks and financial service providers?

People don't want one‑size‑fits‑all products anymore. They expect their bank to recognise how they actually spend: whether that's splitting a purchase into instalments, setting limits that match their budget, or choosing rewards that feel relevant. Most customers now start and finish their banking on a phone. They expect to sign up, move money, and get help without stepping into a branch or waiting on hold. For banks and fintechs, the challenge isn't easy to pin down. They need to make payments feel personal, but at the same time every digital interaction has to be fast and dependable.

What risks or blind spots do you think the industry is underestimating as we move into 2026?

One risk the industry underestimates is how hard it is to support growing customer choice on existing payment infrastructure.

For banks, offering more payment and credit options means making more decisions at the point of transaction and doing so using live data. That increases the number of checks, rules and updates systems have to handle every day, often across multiple products at once.

In Europe, pressure on card margins makes this harder still. Issuers can't rely on static products or slow change cycles if they want to stay competitive. Many legacy platforms, still built around batch processing, simply aren't designed to support frequent changes to pricing, limits or features.

The blind spot is assuming these demands can be met with small tweaks. In practice, they point to the need for cloud-first issuing infrastructure that can support regular change without adding operational risk.

If you were advising a bank's leadership team today, what strategic priority should they focus on to stay competitive in 2026 and beyond?

I'd focus on preparing for a shift towards tokenisation.

Card networks are already moving in that direction. Mastercard, for example, has been open about its plans to move away from manual entry of 16-digit card numbers and towards token-based payments. That change is driven by fraud reduction, but it has wider consequences for how issuing systems need to work.

As payments move to tokens by default, platforms built around static card numbers start to feel restrictive. Wallet provisioning, card lifecycle management and real-time controls all rely on infrastructure that can work with tokens as standard, rather than treating them as an add-on.

For bank leadership teams, this makes tokenisation a core infrastructure decision, not a feature choice. Banks that invest early in cloud-first, token-ready issuing platforms will be better placed to support wallets, new payment experiences and stronger security without disruption. Those that delay are likely to face more forced and expensive change later on.

Thank you Julie! You can connect with Julie on her LinkedIn Profile and find out more about the company at www.paymentology.com.